Terrifying Cases of Evil Demon-Powered Monster Houses

Haunted houses are scary enough, but even scarier still is when the house is not just inhabited by ghosts, but rather infused with malevolent and demonic power. In such cases, the house itself seems to be evil, almost in a sense having a sinister intelligence of its own or serving as a gateway for frightening forces from beyond our understanding. Here we will look at truly monstrous houses, cursed by insidious forces and prowled by demons. 

The settlement of Quindaro, Kansas, in what is now Kansas City, originally began life in late 1856, created by abolitionists along the bank of the Missouri River as a resistance to stop the westward spread of slavery and to serve as an effort to make Kansas a free state. The town soon saw a deluge of migrants who were trying to help secure Kansas as a free territory, and became an important runaway-slave settlement and port of entry for abolitionists and free state activists, with Quindaro heavily involved in aiding the underground railroad at the time, helping slaves who had escaped from Missouri. When Kansas eventually became a free state, its growth slowed somewhat and parts of it became abandoned, it still functioned for some time as a gathering place for former slaves, and in 1865 the Quindaro Freedman's School was established, which was the first black school west of the Mississippi River. It was a very important town in its time, but it also has a secret dark history of a house that seems to have been hungry for blood and which proved to be a magnet for strange phenomena and would be rumored to be cursed.

It was at about this time when in 1867 Mrs. Wilhelmina Miller and her husband moved to a modest farmhouse in Quindaro, and it did not take too long before things went south. Mrs. Miller began having an affair with a farmhand by the name of Manz, and it was no secret to anyone at all. She would apparently do little to hide the affair and was even caught in the act by Mr. Miller on several occasions, who just seemed to try and look the other way as much as possible. Yet, one day it seemed as if he wasn’t prepared to be cuckolded anymore, and he snapped, sneaking up behind the two lovers one day to blow Manz’s head off before running off to be found hanging from a rafter in the barn from an apparent suicide. So far, so dark, but this property was just getting started.

Mrs. Miller hired a new farmhand by the name of Theodore Seidrich to replace the one whose head had been blown off, and she also started living with a new boyfriend, who was a soldier. Unfortunately, Miller was soon having relations with the new strapping young farmhand as well. The soldier boyfriend found out about it and left, which is what the farmhand should have done, it appears, as he would soon after be found dead in an apparent accidental overdose of medicine given to him by Miller. It is unclear whether she had intentionally killed the young man or not, but it is curious that she straight after this shacked up with a new boyfriend named John Fanschel, who ended up leaving after becoming increasingly spooked about the rumors he was hearing about his new girlfriend and the house they were living in, now developing a reputation as being haunted. After he left, one day people just stopped seeing Miller around, and it was assumed that she must have abandoned the property and left town. Even at this point, locals were whispering that the Miller house was haunted and even cursed, but they would soon have more reason to think this.

It seems as if another farmer in the area decided to go check out the creepy abandoned Miller farm one day in 1899 after one of Miller’s cows wandered onto his property looking underfed and emaciated. When he went to the spooky home and went inside, he soon found Miller dead on her own bed and the body of a man named Jacob Shaler on the floor. Miller had been killed with two gunshots to the chest and one to the mouth, whereas Shaler had died of a single gunshot to the side of the head in an apparent suicide. Authorities would come to the conclusion that Shaler had killed Miller several days before he had finally killed himself, although it could not be determined what he had been doing during that time. Rather spookily, another local man who lived nearby claimed that this had happened there at the house before, indeed in that very same room. The man claimed that 21 years before, another couple had lived there, who had apparently quickly become recluses. No one really knew much about them and he himself could not even recall their names, but they would soon make waves in the community when they turned up dead of gunshot wounds in the very same room where Miller and her apparent lover had been found, and according to the witness, on the same day. He would say:

“Twenty-two years ago a strange couple moved into the house an cultivated some of the adjoining land. They kept to themselves, did not interfere with anybody's business, and so the neighbors did not learn their names. Twenty-one years ago this very night we came down to this house on the same errand on which we came this morning. not having seen them around for a week or so, and as sure as you stand there, sir, we found that man and woman in this same room, dead-- both with pistol shots in their head. Not having any friends, the county buried them, and no one to this day knows who they were or where they came from. I hardly think that anyone who knows the circumstances would wish to live in this house, and it will be avoided as a terrible spot.”

After all of this death and misfortune, no one dared live in the house again, and indeed most people chose to avoid it altogether, reluctant to even walk past it, with rumors that even looking upon it could drive one to insanity. The rumor was that all of these deaths had been brought about by supernatural forces worming their way into the brains of these people to drive them to do what they had done. Reports of all manner of ghostly activity would be reported from the property over the years, including orbs of light, shadow figures, and the sound of disembodied screams, moans, or even gunshots from within the house. Interestingly, the town would face a great decline in later years until it was completely abandoned and was only rediscovered in 1980 during an archeological study. In 2019, the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act designated it the Quindaro Townsite National Commemorative Site and much of the site was restored to be preserved for educational purposes, but the Miller farmhouse is long gone, taking whatever dark forces that may have lurked there with it. Whatever was going on here has been lost to history, and we are left to wonder. Was there some dark force hovering around this farm, driving people insane and feeding off of death? Or is this just folklore building upon tragedy? There is no way to know, and it is a curious mystery surrounding a local historical oddity.

Moving along to other evil houses, in 1905, a 5-year-old girl named Gisèle Fortier moved into an old, historical, New-France-style home in Montreal, Canada along with her mother Denise, and her author father, Paul. Mr. Fortier had recently released a book titled The Fields of Amaranth, which had been receiving rave reviews, and so he had purchased this quaint historical house as a perfect place to start working on his next literary manuscript. At first, everything was going fine, until a series of strange, paranormal events would begin to permeate the house like a dark cloud.

It began when Denise started hearing strange, inexplicable noises throughout the residence. Sometimes it was knocks or bangs with no discernible source, while at other times it sounded like footsteps when no one was home and eeriest of all, the disembodied voices of children laughing. Adding to this were sudden temperature drops that would make her shiver in summer, as well as the unshakeable feeling that she was always being watched. It was strange enough that she began to suspect that the house was perhaps haunted, and she began researching the past of the house, which would bring with it gruesome revelations.

One of the first things she found was that the site of the house had once harbored a correctional facility for wayward and orphaned children, which didn’t seem too ominous until she got to the part about two of these children murdering the owners and setting fire to the property. The two boys had then been arrested and hanged for their crimes, and ever since the house was known in the area as being cursed, haunted, or both. This explained why such a sprawling estate had been so cheap, as well as why locals seemed to avoid it at all costs. 

When Denise told her husband about her findings, he was dismissive, refusing to believe stories of ghosts and even writing off the past tragedies as mere urban legends. Despite this, Denise went about arranging for a priest to come and exorcise the home, but even the priest did not believe her. She nevertheless remained obsessed with the idea that the house was haunted, to the point that it was causing tension in her marriage. One night, things got worse when her daughter, Gisele, complained that she was freezing cold even though the rest of the house was balmy on the summer evening. Her mother assured her things would be alright, tucked her in, and left her there in the darkened room. It was a mundane gesture, and there would have been no hint of the turmoil that was yet to come.

At some point during the night, Gisele woke to the smell of smoke wafting into her room from the hallway. She warily got up and crept towards her parent's room, where the smoke became thicker and almost choking. As scared as she was, Gisele nevertheless flung her parents’ bedroom door open and was met with the sight of a blazing inferno raging through the room, as well as her father lying on the floor in a pool of blood with a pair of scissors jutting from his neck. More horrifying than any of this was that her mother was on the bed, surrounded by licking flames and seemingly being attacked by two spectral little boys, who beat and kicked her while giggling gleefully. Gisele would run to neighbors for help but the father was dead at the scene and the mother was in a coma from which she would never wake, dying just three months later. Oddly, there was no sign of there having ever been a fire, and there was no trace of the two little boys Denise described.

Authorities were highly skeptical of Gisele” 's version of events, instead coming to the conclusion that the father had attacked the mother who had then defended herself with a pair of scissors. As to Gisele’s insistence that there had been a father and two attackers beating her mother senseless, the entire account was dismissed out of hand. Orphaned and traumatized, Gisèle would be sent to Seattle to live with her grandparents, leaving the home abandoned and forsaken once again. According to the tale, shortly after this the house mysteriously burned down again, and this time it was left in a state of rubble and ashes. According to the legend, anyone who tries to build something there will soon watch it burn down to smoldering ruins, and this place is cursed forevermore. Is there any truth to this or is it all a creepy urban legend? We may never know for sure. 

In the world of architecture, there are not many names that are as instantly familiar as Frank Lloyd Wright. Born in 1867, the American architect would display innovation and genius throughout his career, designing over 1,000 structures of all types, including such famous landmarks as the house in rural southwestern Pennsylvania called Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture,” and in which Wright’s flair for organic architecture blended into the environment is on full display. He is widely considered to be the best American architect of all time, but he was also well-known for his colorful personality and his tempestuous private life. It is here where we get into the darkness behind the legend, and one of his famous works would end up being notorious for the dark cloud of death surrounding it.

In 1903, Wright was commissioned to work on a home for a wealthy businessman by the name of Edwin Cheney, and that was how he met Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney, Edwin’s wife. By all accounts, he was completely smitten with Martha and became obsessed with her, a sentiment that seems to have gone both ways. Before long the two were embroiled in a passionate affair, but there were two problems. One was that Martha was married with two kids, and the other was that Wright himself was not only married to Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin but also had six children of his own. For Wright this was really no big deal, as he firmly believed that Martha was his intellectual equal and so was different, once saying. “A man needs two women. One to be the mother of his children and the other to be his mental companion, his inspiration and soulmate.” Nevertheless, this was quite the conundrum, but it didn’t bother Wright at all. As a solution, he came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was simply leave his family and build a separate house where they could have privacy and go on with their affair unfettered, although it was the worst-kept secret in town.

After running off to Europe together for a time, the construction began in earnest, and the result was the magnificent structure called Taliesin, which means “Shining-Brow” in Welsh, and was to be a residence and studio he secretly had built in 1911 in Spring Green, Wisconsin. It is a handsome, stately building, as one would expect from a design by Wright, and he did some of his best work while living there. Here the two lovers lived mostly in peace at first, along with Martha’s two children, and the media ate it up, often calling the building the “Castle of Love.” There was nothing discreet about any of it, and dark clouds were on the horizon, as the property would later seem to be cursed with bad luck.

In August of 1914, Wright was out of town in Chicago in order to work on one of his most iconic designs, the Midway Gardens, in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, while his mistress stayed home at Taliesin. On August 14, Martha, her two children, and various laborers and draftsmen gathered in the main dining hall to enjoy a sumptuous dinner served by a house servant and handyman by the name of Julian Carlton and his wife, Gertrude. It would soon turn from a joyous get-together to sheer horror when Carlton suddenly asked his wife to leave and then attacked Martha and her kids with a hatchet, before dousing the room with gasoline and setting it alight. The panicked guests soon found that the doors had been barricaded, and the stark-raving Carlton ran around indiscriminately hacking at the victims with his hatchet the whole time as they tried to escape the inferno. In the end, while two people managed to escape the blaze, the horrific incident left the other 7 dead, including Martha and her two children, and much of Taliesin in smoldering ruin. The attacker, Carlton, tried to kill himself by swallowing muriatic acid but was found unconscious in the basement, dying weeks later in medical care of starvation due to his destroyed esophagus, without ever explaining why he had carried out his grim deed. The theory was that Carlton, who was allegedly originally from Barbados, had snapped after receiving racial discrimination from workers, or because he was due to be fired from his job, but no one really knows what made him do it.

Of course, the tragedy hit the news in a major way, and all eyes were on Wright to see what he would do. In defiance, he went about rebuilding the gutted estate, which he would call Taliesin II. In the meantime, he did much work abroad, such as at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. He also wasted no time in falling in love with another woman named Miriam Noel, who he would wed in 1923 when his divorce from his first wife finally went through, and he would get married yet again in 1928 to his third wife Olgivanna Lazović. Third time’s a charm? Bad luck continued at the house in the meantime, when another fire hit in 1925 due to faulty wiring and much of it had to be rebuilt again as Taliesin III, and the estate was nearly foreclosed on in 1927, with Wright kicked out and just barely managing to reacquire it with financial help from friends. Despite all of these issues and the tragedy that hung over its past, Wright would live there for the rest of his life up to his death in 1959, using it as his home, studio, and a museum of sorts, exhibiting a vast collection of Asian artworks. Taliesin would go on to be designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2019.

The house remains open to tourists to this day and is visited by thousands of people every year. And yes, why it is said to be haunted. People will report cold spots, taps on the shoulder, and seeing shadowy figures in the halls, so perhaps the dead are still around. It is all a dark, little-known look behind the romanticized, larger-than-life veneer of one of the greatest architects who ever lived, and serves as a strange historical oddity.

Some cursed houses seem to be imbued with some sort of demonic power. Our story here takes us back to 1962 and William Adams, who was a normal working class man who worked the graveyard shift at the Detroit Cadillac plant, in Detroit, Michigan, and had just moved into a rented house with his family. They were pretty ordinary people, with nothing particularly odd or special about them. Indeed, they were completely unassuming and mundane in every way. Yet, they were about to become the center of one of the strangest and most intense hauntings the city had ever seen, involving spirits and possibly demons. 

It began with the nightmares. When they moved into the house William took to sleeping during the day in a tiny, secluded bedroom in the back of the house to not be disturbed by the noise of his five young children, and shortly after settling in, he began to have horrific, potent nightmares. These bad dreams were incredibly realistic and horrifying, featuring all manner of grotesque imagery to the point that he would wake in a cold sweat screaming so loudly that the neighbors could hear. These nightmares would come to him every night, and every night he would wake in a terrified panic, never remembering exactly what had happened in these dreams but in a complete state of dread. He had never experienced anything quite like it, and it got so bad that he was running on very little sleep, unable to function at his job, and he was starting to think that he might be losing his mind and in need of mental help. He decided that he could not stand sleeping in that room anymore, and oddly when he went back to sleeping in the master bedroom the nightmares ceased. At the time William did not attribute any of this to the paranormal, however, this was only the beginning of the strangeness.

It would soon turn out that that back room had a certain sinister atmosphere to it. The family dog refused to go anywhere near the room, and the children claimed that they sometimes heard strange noises coming from within so they avoided it as well. William checked the room out several times and noticed that he felt very cold when he was in there, even in the summer, and that there was an indescribable air of dread pervading it. He could not figure out why this should be, as the room was just a tiny little space barely big enough for a bed and a closet, and by all appearances, there wasn’t anything menacing about it at all. Yet the dog and kids were terrified of it and he could not deny that there was definitely a strange, slightly threatening ambiance when he was in there.

Despite this, when William’s grandmother came to visit them, he offered the room as a guest room, but she too was immediately aware that there was something off about the place. She nevertheless slept in there, but during the night she heard noises in the floor and walls that she described as sounding like someone was trying to break it, and she would refuse to sleep there again. Indeed, she was so scared by the experience that she cut her trip short and hastily went back to her own home. Thinking that there had been an intruder trying to break in, William contacted the police, but they could find no trace of a break-in or anything suspicious at all. It was now starting to dawn on him that, despite his unwillingness to believe it, there was maybe possibly something paranormal going on. He looked into the history of the house, but all he could find out about that room was that it had been added to the house after the original structure had been built, nothing that would explain why there were so many strange phenomena orbiting it. 

When William’s cousin Shirley Patterson came to visit, he stayed in the room as well, and it did not take long at all for things to get weird. Patterson was not told anything about the strange things that had been going on in the room, and in a way, it was sort of an experiment, since he was known to be a practical and skeptical rational individual who would not be prone to making anything up or having his mind play games with him. However, that night he would feel himself be turned over by some unseen force to be confronted with the sight of what looked like a woman standing by the doorway facing the other way, with long hair and wearing what looked like a short fur coat over a blue dress. He at first thought it must be Mrs. Adams, but as he studied her he realized that it was not, and at the same time he was suddenly overcome with a sharp, irrational fear that practically paralyzed him. He would say of the incident:

“I didn't know anything about the room. There was no reason for me to suspect anything. No reason to be afraid. It seems that I was in the bed for just a few minutes. I don’t know whether I was asleep or not. I was facing the wall, and then I felt something turn me over. Don't ask me to describe the feeling. All I know, is that it rolled me over, and then I saw it standing outside the bedroom door. At first I thought it was Lillian, but I started to tremble. It was a woman with long hair, and she had her back to me, looking into the kitchen. She was wearing a short fur coat, and a kind of blue dress.”

His fear became so intense that he screamed out, and when he did all of the lights in the house went out to send darkness crashing down on them. Patterson stumbled around in the blackness and found his way to the kitchen when the lights turned on to show Mrs. Adams standing there and no sign of the woman in the blue dress. As he talked to her they could hear what sounded like groans coming from the bedroom and a foul stench wafted through the house that made them feel sick. As they tried to figure out where the smell and that sound were coming from there was a sudden loud wailing scream that sounded “like the mournful scream of something half-human and half-animal,” and a trapdoor in the utility room opened and slammed shut with great force, sending the two of them into a state of abject terror. When William came home from his late shift, they told him what had happened and the police were called once again, but all of the doors and windows were locked and there was no sign of a break-in or intruder. At this point, William was thinking enough was enough, and he decided that he would go back and stay in that room the following evening to see for himself what was going on and confront whatever was in there. He would get more than he bargained for, and he would later say of what happened in that room:

“I'm not the kind of guy who believes in ghosts--at least I didn't then. I'm a grown man with a family. I've been in the Army. I just couldn't convince myself that there was anything to it. I had to try again, and see what would happen. I don’t know how long it was. I was still awake. I heard a noise in the room. I turned over to look and there was a face inches away from me. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. The eyes stared past me and the mouth moved to talk but only a hissing noise came out- and a terrible stench. All I could think of that next morning was that if the bedroom door had been closed that Sunday night, I would have killed myself beating against it to get out.”

The sight of that face hovering in the gloom in front of him in that dim room sent him into a hysterical panic, fear driving him up from the bed to send him careening down the hall screaming. Indeed, he was in such a panicked state that Patterson and his wife supposedly had to wrap a blanket around him and throw him into a chair to calm him down. As they did this, the sickening stench they had smelled before came back, saturating the air with the most repugnant smell they had ever experienced and making Patterson vomit. This was enough to send the family packing, with them hastily grabbing their things and children and immediately leaving to go stay at a neighbor’s house. The very next day they would move out, never to return to that cursed house and its paranormal weirdness. 

Not long after this, Mrs. Adams’ brother, Leo Sanocki, and her sister Virginia came to check the house out and help the family move some of their things out because they were too afraid to go in there again. Curious as to whether there was anything to the story or not, Leo decided to go to that back room and see what the fuss was about. He did not believe in any of the ghost talk he had heard at all, but this was about to change. Virginia would say what happened next:

“I stood out in the kitchen, and Leo said he was going lie down on the bed for 10 minutes in the dark. A few minutes later, I heard this awful groan come from the bedroom. If it was Leo, I have never heard him make a sound like that before. Then he came rushing through the door into the kitchen, with the most horrible look on his face, like he was scared out of his mind. I asked him what he saw, but he wouldn't tell me anything.”

Leo never would tell anyone what he had seen in that room, but it was bad enough that he had nightmares for weeks after, and he would refuse to ever step foot in the house again. After this, the house remained empty even as its notoriety grew, and the landlady allegedly forbade any paranormal investigators from checking the place out, so we may never really know what was going on here. What was going on here and what terrorized this family so intensely? Was it a ghost, a demon, or something else? Why was it tethered so strongly to that room? We may never know, and it seems that for now, this strange place keeps its secrets close.

In another recent case of a demon-infested house, a family and their home were claimed to have been infiltrated by demons or even the Devil himself. In November of 2011, a young woman named Latoya Ammons, her mother, Rosa Campbell, and her three children then ages 7, 9, and 12, came to Gary, Indiana, and moved into a modest, quiet home at 3860 Carolina Street. At the time they were happy to be there, and although the house was just a rather plain-looking rental cottage it was for them in a way their dream home. Yet, pretty much as soon as they arrived there were strange, rather ominous phenomena that began to plague them, and which would hint at some sinister force residing and festering there.

The first usual thing the family noticed happened in December, when a high number of black flies began buzzing and crawling around the house, most often concentrated on the small porch of the residence. This was odd enough as it is because it was winter, but what made it even weirder was that sometimes these flies would swarm about in thick black clouds and get everywhere, even though there was no discernible reason for them to gather there so intensely and none of the neighbors had a fly problem at all. The family went about trying to exterminate the unseasonable profusion of flies, but no matter what they did the insects returned in droves, of which Rosa Campbell would later lament, “This is not normal. We killed them and killed them and killed them, but they kept coming back.”

Unfortunately, the plague of flies would turn out to be the least of their worries. At around the same time, it is alleged that there would often be heard the heavy thud of disembodied footsteps coming from the stairs down into the basement at night, as well as the creaking sound of the door from the basement to the kitchen opening, even when it was locked, and there were once found to be wet boot prints left behind. In addition to this, there were purportedly numerous cases of poltergeist activity such as slamming doors and moving objects, and on at least one occasion Campbell was startled to see a dark figure lurking in the living room, which vanished in the blink of an eye. In one instance a religious statue in the home was supposedly smashed to pieces. This paranormal activity steadily grew in intensity, and the Ammons children began missing school because according to her they were being kept awake all night by the strange occurrences.

It all apparently got even worse from there, as various family members began to complain of being pushed or poked by an unseen force, and at one point Campbell would even claim that she had been viciously choked by invisible hands. On another occasion, the older son was also said to be thrown clear across the room as if he were a ragdoll, and on another, the youngest son was allegedly thrown from the bathroom. The daughter also was thrown around and “grabbed by dark shadows.” Even more dramatic than this was an incident in March of 2012 when the 12-year-old daughter was supposedly found levitating over her bed in a trance-like state. According to their version of events, Ammons and Campbell began praying and at this point, the girl floated back down to her bed. Upon waking she claimed to have absolutely no memory of the otherworldly incident, as if it had been wiped from her mind or instigated without her knowledge.

After this rather terrifying event, the children began to exhibit a plethora of strange behaviors and outbursts that suggested that they were under the influence of some demonic, supernatural force. It would be claimed that their eyes would bulge or roll back into their heads, and they would hiss, snarl, and bark like animals at times, without any memory of it. Sometimes they would speak in “demonic voices” or pass out for no reason, during which time they could not be woken up. At other times one of the sons was claimed to have blurted out sinister remarks such as “I will kill you,” or “It’s time to die,” often in a voice that wasn’t his own, and he was even accused of attacking his own brother during one of these violent episodes. Even Ammons herself would claim to have been possessed on occasion.

Increasingly desperate and scared, Ammons reached out for help from the church, and when priests investigated is said that a wide variety of paranormal occurrences were witnessed. Besides the instances of what seemed like demonic possession in the children, there were observed flickering lights and moving objects, including a bottle that allegedly levitated across the room. The church advised the family to try cleansing the house and drawing crosses on the floors and windows, but none of this did any good, so they enlisted the help of clairvoyants to try and ascertain just what they were dealing with. The prognosis was not good, as they would tell Ammons that her home was infested by at least 200 different demons, and in order to combat these dark forces they burned sage and made an altar in the basement, but none of this helped and the family was too poor to simply move away.

Eventually, the Department of Child Services became involved, and there was even supposedly a supernatural event witnessed by one of the Child Service case managers and a nurse, when one of the Ammons boys was supposedly witnessed walking backward up a wall, seeming to defy gravity. The case manager, Valerie Washington, would later talk of what she witnessed, saying “He walked up the wall, flipped over her and stood there. There's no way he could've done that. I believe that it was something going on there that was out of the realm of a normal living person.”

Even the authorities became convinced that something strange was going on, with Police Capt. Charles Austin saying that he believed there was a possible supernatural explanation for the phenomena orbiting the Ammons family after witnessing several strange goings on for himself. Austin would claim that he had taken photos showing phantom shapes with his iPhone, captured a mysterious voice on tape that said “hey,” and he has also said that his car had mysteriously malfunctioned and that his garage door refused to open during the investigation. Despite all of this, the Ammons children were briefly taken from their mother for 6 months while the Department of Child Services performed an investigation, after which they were returned to their mother.

The tale of what would go on to be called the “House of 200 Demons” really hit its stride when it was reported in several high-profile news outlets, most notably a comprehensive 2014 article in The Indianapolis Star, complete with a supposed photo of one of the demons lurking in a window, and another in the New York Daily News. This media coverage propelled the whole dramatic affair into the stratosphere, and the dark and macabre story of a mother of three stalked by demons from Hell captured the public imagination and made it a media sensation. In the meantime, Catholic priest Rev. Michael Maginot was brought in by the beleaguered family and performed at least three exorcisms on the house and the victims, none of which seemed to affect the evil forces surrounding them and their home, which Maginot called “a portal of demons.” Indeed, the activity only stopped when the family finally was able to move away to Indianapolis.

The next tenant of the home reported no unusual activity or paranormal occurrences, and it seems like this should be the end of the story, but this is not the case. Indeed, it seems to almost get even stranger. The house was soon after purchased by Zak Bagans, from the Travel Channel TV show Ghost Adventures, and he went about filming a documentary on the Ammons case, as well as his own experiences at the property, which was to be appropriately titled Demon House. Bagans spared no expense on his documentary, not only outright buying the home, but also gaining access to reams of information on the case, interviewing scores of witnesses at the time, and even bringing back the priest Maginot. Just about the only person he couldn’t get was Ammons herself, who was keen to distance herself from the whole incident.

Unfortunately for Bagans, it seemed as if the demonic activity and influence on the home had not died just yet, and he reported falling seriously ill for several days within just the first week after buying it. For his part, Maginot continuously implored Bagans and his film crew to use crucifixes and other forms of spiritual protection from demons, but Bagans refused because he reasoned that getting the full demon experience was the whole point. According to Bagans, there were numerous technical difficulties, freak accidents experienced by the crew and witnesses, some crew quit, and one of the crew members was so influenced by the supposed demonic presence at the home that Maginot performed an exorcism on him right then and there, which was filmed and made it into the film. Bagans would lament, “This film is cursed,” and even worried about whether merely watching it could be dangerous.

After the filming wrapped in 2016, although it would not be actually released until 2018, Bagans went about having the whole accursed house actually torn down to leave merely an empty lot. According to Maginot, this was a foolish thing to do, and as Bagans had performed no cleansing ritual on the property of any kind, the evil was still there lingering. In his opinion, without this ritual, it makes no difference on its status as a demon portal if there is a physical house there or not, and he has claimed that there are still ghostly occurrences on the property. Maginot has explained:

“That's kind of a sad thing for me. I didn't want people harmed. It's dangerous. It's not an amusement park. There's a danger that you can't control, and if the house was still there and locked up, I felt it could be controlled. It would protect people. People still go there and perform (Satanic) rituals and police come by and chase them off. They're opening up themselves to real danger. As a priest, I would have preferred that it was shown that the house could be cleansed, that it could be taken care of by the church to make it habitable for someone without any problems. That's the happy ending I would have liked to see. Instead it was torn down and it looks like Satan kind of won.”

For now, the property remains an empty, weed-choked lot, but whether it ever had any real demonic presence or not remains debated. There has been much skepticism aimed at the veracity of the claims of Ammons and her family, stating that she was very religious and that her home life was troubled, meaning that it could have influenced her perceptions and those of her children. In particular, Skeptic Joe Nickel did an incredibly detailed and scathing debunking of the case in an article for the Skeptical Inquirer, explaining away and at times outright dismissing many of the supposed supernatural elements. For instance, many of the witnesses, including the police captain, were superstitious and believers in the paranormal, and many of the photographs and recordings taken have rational explanations. He also says that some of the more dramatic reported events such as the crawling up the wall and others may have been misreported and colored by sensationalism and that many of those involved, including Maginot and Ammons, had financial gain to be had from the whole thing. Nickel does not mince words when he offers his summary of the case thus:

“In summary, no demons possessed anyone in this case, except in the figurative sense. What were really unleashed were the dark aspects of superstition, ancient dogma, lust for notoriety, the greed of cynical hucksters, and the stubborn unwillingness of some to be reasoned with.”

Despite this rather damning appraisal, Ammons and her family have continued to insist that it was all true and beyond rational explanation, as have others who were involved and Bagans as well. There are many witnesses who claim to have seen these phenomena for themselves and continue to place them outside of the realm of the normal, so are they all delusional or mistaken? It is hard to say. In the end, it is unclear just what was really going on with this house or the family within it, or whether there were ever sinister supernatural, possibly even demonic forces gathered about them, and we are left to wonder what was going on in what has become one of the most spectacular demonic possession cases of recent times.

What is wrong with these places? Why do they have so many malevolent forces gravitating towards them? Are the structures themselves evil or is it the ground they are built on? Are they somehow serving as portals or gateways for nefarious demonic forces? Or is it something else? Either way, one certainly hopes it would be something any realtor trying to sell a property should be aware of.